SubscribeJanuary 28th, 2011
the dark is an odd place to be
I rode the ferry tonight and noticed again how odd the dark is. You’ll notice the adjacent tweets, that’s part of it, but I wanted to tell you a little story about the dark from a couple of decades ago.
I used to live up on the Divide in Montana, and there in a narrow valley it is truly dark on a dark moon night. When I left the cabin for the outhouse, once you close the door, you have to stand for a few minutes before you can see anything at all. Unless you have a flashlight. But actually, a flashlight makes things worse. The problem is that outside that little circle of light just ahead of your feet, there is nothing at all. At least that’s what your eyes tell you. It’s better to take the flashlight but not to use it. Stand in the utter dark for a few minutes, allow your eyes to adjust and you will find the “nothingness” suddenly has something in it. (The added benefit of handling the dark this way is that you don’t make yourself a target—the little circle of light means everything else on the mountain can see you but all you can see is that little patch of ground near your feet. )
I have a cheap little digital camera and when I was walking around the “sun” deck in the dark I thought I’d see what happened when I took pictures with and without the flash. Anyway, here are a few pictures—me playing with the dark.
September 9th, 2010
Dark moon and skunks
After yesterday’s horror, the morning feels like a shadow on a hot summer’s day. It isn’t light yet and the skunks have yet to go to bed. Luckily for the dog and me, the ambient light is enough that the white hair on the skunk shines brightly, in fact it’s almost luminescent. Along with that and the way it moves, just a glimpse across the alley, even in the pre-dawn dark, was enough for me to grab the dog’s collar and hustle her inside. One skunking in a life is enough.
Despite the heart’s jump-start to the day, the earth’s promise of bliss still lingers. I am heading out now to seek coffee and a place to watch the shadow’s jump and quiver as the earth turns into the sun’s light.
November 25th, 2009
Darkness, light and more moths
I am sitting in my car at Main and 10th. Probably means nothing to you but it is a very busy intersection. I am parked, watching people and cars as they make their way past me.
It’s also dark, but since it is late November most of the shops have already hung their lights and so it’s a bit like having a seat at a light show. The coffee shop on the corner is particularly good. It has a big tree and ribbons of small white lights hanging in all the windows. When I went in a few minutes ago to get my hot chocolate, they have decorated the tables with small red tartan flannel tablecloths. It looks surprising nice – surprising because I don’t much like Christmas and most of the decorations that come with this time of the year are either horribly sentimental or give me the heeby-jeebies.
Despite not liking the holiday, I do like the attention to light in this uncomfortably dark time of year. Of course winter light festivals are a really old practice in human history, since light to a diurnal species is bound to become a symbol when that species becomes able to have symbols.
I’m not really going anywhere with this except to say that I am still thinking about the moth and its instincts – instincts that become problematic in an artificially lighted environment. I wonder what killing the dark does to those moths and humans who live their lives in cities where the real-dark rarely penetrates? Having taught in a variety of wilderness camps, one thing I do know is that people unused to the dark have trouble adjusting to the difference between day and night and that this seems to make them deeply afraid of the world around them — and that fear can cause them to do pretty silly things. I wonder how different that is from what the moth does?
I respect the dark and, depending on where I am, I actually relish it. Still, the lights call out to me and come the shortest day, burning a candle all night reminds me that as much as I may think of my self as something special given that I belong to one of the species (I presume that somewhere in the universe there is another) that can symbolize, what I symbolize makes me remember that I am still very much the human animal evolved in the caverns of deep history.